For the last week I have been toting around two mobile phones: my usual iPhone 3GS workhorse with extended battery a la Mophie and the just-launched-today Sprint HTC EVO 4G on loan from Gregory Miller. This is my first time touching an Android device for more than just a few minutes. As such I think I’m interestingly posed to show a different perspective on the EVO from MG Siegler’s thoughts in his recent post entitled “An iPhone Lover’s Take On The HTC EVO 4G.” Similarly, the EVO 4G has received tremendous press as of late — mainly as it has geared itself as being the “it” phone of the month as well as the first 4G WiMAX phone ever.

This post will sort out my likes and dislikes about the phone rather than serve a full review. If you don’t have time to read this entire post, here’s a summary: huge phone with subpar battery life and a great camera.

Pros

Huge screen and small bezels are usually the recipe for a slick product but I miss a bit of bezel useful for holding onto while taking pictures. I would often accidentally hit the button while trying to take a picture.

1GHz processor makes things snappy. Every Android user I’ve shown the phone to said it felt much faster than whatever Android phone they had. Froyo should make things even faster.

Google Voice integration (this is a general Android feature but a huge selling point for me)

The rear of the EVO houses a sturdy kickstand, dual LED flash, protruding 8-megapixel autofocusing camera and speaker.

Cons

HTC Sense UI add-on means that Android updates must come from HTC, not immediately OTA from Google.. so you might have to wait months to receive the lightning fast Android 2.2 “Froyo” update. Nexus One owners already have Froyo.

Lackluster battery life (about 4 hours with my use - about the same as my overworked iPhone) and the rear battery cover is flimsy plastic held in place by some small clips that are sure to break soon.

microSD card awkwardly placed under battery. Not that you need to take it out too often or anything. Just plug microUSB cable into EVO and tell Android to use in disk mode.

Camera lens protrudes from the EVO’s body such that resting it on a flat surface causes the metal rim of the lens to make contact.

Power button is almost flush with the body and not very ergonomic. Could be easier to push.

Android apps are nothing like iPhone apps. Most are crap. One of the most popular apps is a task killer application to keep things running smooth, or at least that’s the claim. I have noticed the phone get slow to a crawl at times unless I keep an eye on how many apps are open, despite Android’s stellar memory management.

Look ma, no hands!

Camera

While the 4G WiMAX is what Sprint and HTC are promoting the heck out of with the EVO, that means little to me in San Francisco where a 4G network isn’t slated to emerge for about a year. The next most impressive hardware feature in that case is the camera. I place a lot of importance on my cell phone’s camera. My iPhone currently has over 5,000 iPhone-taken photos on it. The iPhone is not happy with that situation and is very slow. It’s not meant to be used for anything more casual use. The EVO’s camera is by far the best phone camera I have ever used. Best “phone camera”… what does that mean? It means that the pictures look good enough up to around 1600px wide. After that you can see some compression artifacts and grain. For the most part, given sufficient lighting conditions you can leave your Point & Shoot camera at home and have good enough pictures to throw up on Facebook. Of course, there’s no real physical zoom with the EVO so zooming in will just look pixelated.

Camera settings galore!

The flash is very bright, so much so that it will wash out people/subjects in close proximity. Autofocus has a harder time in low lighting so you have to be patient while it focuses. For the most part the camera interface is slick and snapping pictures is lighting quick compared to the iPhone with the exception of autofocusing. The front-facing 1.3MP camera is nothing to write home about but affords users the ability to finally do video chat. I tested it out on a 15-minute video chat on Skype via Fring and it worked quite well. Though my mother did mention there was a slight video delay (I was on my WiFi network).

EVO-taken Photos

EVO-taken 720p HD Videos

I was randomly at 3rd and Market when Obama’s massive motorcade drove by.

Golden Gate Bridge as seen from Land’s End Trail near Ocean Beach

Great view of SF from the de Young Museum Tower

Verdict

I went to Best Buy today (EVO launch day) and waited in a long line for about 15 minutes before leaving the store without buying anything. I didn’t want the phone that bad. To get an everyday-usable phone setup I would need to get a case to protect the protruding lens, external battery pack so that it would last more than 4 hours and a handful of micro-USB cables to keep around the apartment, with my laptop, in my bag with an extra charger and so on. That would start to get pricey.

Even more so, I really wanted the mobile hotspot feature without paying the $30/month premium. That is available in Android 2.2 which I could get on the EVO with a few hours spent rooting it and installing a Sense-less Froyo, or with some other Android phone. The cheapest EVO 4G plan with mobile hotspot is $109/month — rather high. My iPhone bill is currently ~$90/month due to add-on $15 text messaging.

So I’m going to wait. Wait to see what Steve Jobs announces on Monday. Regardless of how paradigm shifting the rumored iPhone 4G is I do not see myself purchasing it if it is still tied to AT&T. Dual cameras. Neat. 960×640 IPS HD display. Great. AT&T. Fail.

This was a rather quick review and I left a lot of information out. Let me know if you have any questions about the phone or Android in general in the comments and I’ll reply!

Thoughts? Do you currently have an Android phone? Which? What network?

Enjoy this post? Click through and leave a comment. It will make my day. Review: Sprint HTC EVO 4G Android Phone

For the last week I have been toting around two mobile phones: my usual iPhone 3GS workhorse with extended battery a la Mophie and the just-launched-today Sprint HTC EVO 4G on loan from Gregory Miller. This is my first time touching an Android device for more than just a few minutes. As such I think I’m interestingly posed to show a different perspective on the EVO from MG Siegler’s thoughts in his recent post entitled “An iPhone Lover’s Take On The HTC EVO 4G.” Similarly, the EVO 4G has received tremendous press as of late — mainly as it has geared itself as being the “it” phone of the month as well as the first 4G WiMAX phone ever.

This post will sort out my likes and dislikes about the phone rather than serve a full review. If you don’t have time to read this entire post, here’s a summary: huge phone with subpar battery life and a great camera.

Pros

Huge screen and small bezels are usually the recipe for a slick product but I miss a bit of bezel useful for holding onto while taking pictures. I would often accidentally hit the button while trying to take a picture.

1GHz processor makes things snappy. Every Android user I’ve shown the phone to said it felt much faster than whatever Android phone they had. Froyo should make things even faster.

Google Voice integration (this is a general Android feature but a huge selling point for me)

The rear of the EVO houses a sturdy kickstand, dual LED flash, protruding 8-megapixel autofocusing camera and speaker.

Cons

HTC Sense UI add-on means that Android updates must come from HTC, not immediately OTA from Google.. so you might have to wait months to receive the lightning fast Android 2.2 “Froyo” update. Nexus One owners already have Froyo.

Lackluster battery life (about 4 hours with my use - about the same as my overworked iPhone) and the rear battery cover is flimsy plastic held in place by some small clips that are sure to break soon.

microSD card awkwardly placed under battery. Not that you need to take it out too often or anything. Just plug microUSB cable into EVO and tell Android to use in disk mode.

Camera lens protrudes from the EVO’s body such that resting it on a flat surface causes the metal rim of the lens to make contact.

Power button is almost flush with the body and not very ergonomic. Could be easier to push.

Android apps are nothing like iPhone apps. Most are crap. One of the most popular apps is a task killer application to keep things running smooth, or at least that’s the claim. I have noticed the phone get slow to a crawl at times unless I keep an eye on how many apps are open, despite Android’s stellar memory management.

Look ma, no hands!

Camera

While the 4G WiMAX is what Sprint and HTC are promoting the heck out of with the EVO, that means little to me in San Francisco where a 4G network isn’t slated to emerge for about a year. The next most impressive hardware feature in that case is the camera. I place a lot of importance on my cell phone’s camera. My iPhone currently has over 5,000 iPhone-taken photos on it. The iPhone is not happy with that situation and is very slow. It’s not meant to be used for anything more casual use. The EVO’s camera is by far the best phone camera I have ever used. Best “phone camera”… what does that mean? It means that the pictures look good enough up to around 1600px wide. After that you can see some compression artifacts and grain. For the most part, given sufficient lighting conditions you can leave your Point & Shoot camera at home and have good enough pictures to throw up on Facebook. Of course, there’s no real physical zoom with the EVO so zooming in will just look pixelated.

Camera settings galore!

The flash is very bright, so much so that it will wash out people/subjects in close proximity. Autofocus has a harder time in low lighting so you have to be patient while it focuses. For the most part the camera interface is slick and snapping pictures is lighting quick compared to the iPhone with the exception of autofocusing. The front-facing 1.3MP camera is nothing to write home about but affords users the ability to finally do video chat. I tested it out on a 15-minute video chat on Skype via Fring and it worked quite well. Though my mother did mention there was a slight video delay (I was on my WiFi network).

EVO-taken Photos

EVO-taken 720p HD Videos

I was randomly at 3rd and Market when Obama’s massive motorcade drove by.

Golden Gate Bridge as seen from Land’s End Trail near Ocean Beach

Great view of SF from the de Young Museum Tower

Verdict

I went to Best Buy today (EVO launch day) and waited in a long line for about 15 minutes before leaving the store without buying anything. I didn’t want the phone that bad. To get an everyday-usable phone setup I would need to get a case to protect the protruding lens, external battery pack so that it would last more than 4 hours and a handful of micro-USB cables to keep around the apartment, with my laptop, in my bag with an extra charger and so on. That would start to get pricey.

Even more so, I really wanted the mobile hotspot feature without paying the $30/month premium. That is available in Android 2.2 which I could get on the EVO with a few hours spent rooting it and installing a Sense-less Froyo, or with some other Android phone. The cheapest EVO 4G plan with mobile hotspot is $109/month — rather high. My iPhone bill is currently ~$90/month due to add-on $15 text messaging.

So I’m going to wait. Wait to see what Steve Jobs announces on Monday. Regardless of how paradigm shifting the rumored iPhone 4G is I do not see myself purchasing it if it is still tied to AT&T. Dual cameras. Neat. 960×640 IPS HD display. Great. AT&T. Fail.

This was a rather quick review and I left a lot of information out. Let me know if you have any questions about the phone or Android in general in the comments and I’ll reply!

Thoughts? Do you currently have an Android phone? Which? What network?

Enjoy this post? Click through and leave a comment. It will make my day. Review: Sprint HTC EVO 4G Android Phone

Media Temple has listened to the masses and finally made a VPS offering aimed at developers and advanced users. While their (dv) Dedicated-Virtual VPS offerings allowed users to have root access and the ability to modify much of the installed software, it was still a fairly turnkey solution: create a new account, transfer files/databases over and everything is ready to go. It also ran Parallels Plesk control panel which sys admins and developers unanimously seem to despise for a mixture of Plesk being a resource hog as well as only working well for out-of-the-box configurations and becoming a burden with custom setups — say, a Rails app. There is a large market for tech-savvy folks that prefer to handle all aspects of server setup and administration themselves. Enter the (ve) Virtual Environment.

A new product series has been created, ProDev, which caters to the side of our customer base that wishes to take hosting a step further. These users want more controls and low-level options. Therefore, we’re working on new ProDev products, such as an API, CDN and Advanced DNS, that compliment (ve) Server.— (mt)

You know who these people are — they typically congregate around Linode, Amazon EC2 and Slicehost services. They know exactly what OS and solution stack they want to use, their favorite kernel version and so on. After having a more than a few issues with their (gs) Grid-Server, Media Temple needs for this latest (ve) offering to catch on. Here’s why I think it will.

Full Disclosure: I have been exclusively hosted with Media Temple for almost 5 years now and have a partnership with them. They often hook me up with free food whenever I’m in Culver City or at one of their events at SXSW.

(ve) Basics

(ve) Server is designed for users who have significant experience with Linux, or for those who are interested in learning. Our goal is to give customers complete control of their Virtual Environment, therefore servers are delivered with SSH only. You will control and install all software.

In regards to hardware, the (ve) is far from commodity hardware with SAS disks in RAID 10 but I digress; if you want to read more about specs visit their site. Media Temple lets you install Ubuntu LTS, Ubuntu, Fedora release 12, Debian and CentOS distributions on (ve) servers. After choosing what OS you want installed on the server and waiting about 10 minutes to have it provisioned, you get to SSH into a basic Linux installation. Nothing is pre-installed. This gives you the freedom (or burden, if you are relatively new to Linux and systems administration) to setup everything on your own.

Now you get the point of the (ve) server — you run the show and know your way around Linux for the most part. Media Temple has several guides online that help with basic setup. For those considering such a developer-friendly VPS option, be warned that a solid setup is at least a few hours away of installing packages, configuring files, transferring files, importing databases, configuring more files, securing everything, monitoring for a while and tweaking for optimal performance.

As far as pricing is concerned, the (ve) is priced competitively. Below is simple comparison on the pricing of the closest offering to a 1GB RAM VPS:

Linode, Slicehost, Media Temple

Media Temple’s logic is that they can afford to price the (ve) as such since advanced users (the target market) are much less likely to require technical support.

My Setup & Experience so far

This blog has been hosted on a (dv) 3.5 with 2GB of RAM (though I think you temporarily get access to 3GB of RAM for under high load) for over 2 years now. That setup started getting finicky and needed daily or sometimes twice daily Apache restarts or it would crash on its own. Needless to say, it was time to start from scratch with a clean setup — much like how I tend to completely reinstall OS X every year or so (or back in my Windows XP days, every 6-9 months).

(ve) Control Panel in the Media Temple Account Center

I was not much of a CentOS fan on the (dv) server, so I chose to setup my (ve) with Ubuntu. Once the (ve) server was added to my Media Temple account, I enabled root SSH access and SSH’d in, with my first objective being creating a new user, adding that user to the sudoers file and configuring SSH to disallow root SSH login. This will probably sound familiar to you if you have tinkered with a fresh Linux server install before. If not, several of Media Temple’s guides will come in handy but for the most part apt-get is your friend.

A while later I had a simple LAMP setup with Webmin (lightweight control panel) configured on my (ve) server. I temporarily changed an Amazon S3 blog backup to public, downloaded it on the (ve), uncompressed the files into the public web folder then imported a recent database dump with Sequel Pro. The last step was logging into the Account Center and changing the zone file to point to the new server. I had set the TTL low so the DNS propagated quickly and the new server was live within minutes.

(ve) Server Guide

Then I got in touch with Chris Lea at Media Temple who looked over my setup and offered a few suggestions and made some adjustments. Notably he installed and configured nginx as a reverse proxy to serve static files — images, javascript, CSS, HTML, XML, et cetera — while letting Apache handle the dynamic stuff. I prefer this setup over a wholly nginx configuration so that all my .htaccess rewrite rules would remain in place (and not need to be rewritten for nginx) and so that various WordPress plugins that need their own rewrite rules would not break when they needed to tweak those settings. Also, since I use a caching plugin that creates static HTML cache files, nginx will end up serving most pages, leaving resource-hogging Apache with little to do. The best of both worlds in my opinion.

Chris also installed APC for PHP, set expires headers for all image types to 1 day and enabled compression for text based file types (I wrote about compression for Apache a while ago). And finally, munin was installed for resource monitoring.

All said and done, the server is now using around 400MB of RAM most of the time. Compare that to using at least 2GB of RAM at idle with my last (unstable) server setup and I’m rather delighted. Other performance options I had considered were Squid (but was told nginx is better for a reverse proxy role) and Varnish. Of course, this blog does not receive anywhere near the amount of traffic to need those kinds of advanced setups.

While the (ve) box does not come with a hefty, resource-intense control panel like Plesk included on (dv) servers, it does come with Parallels Power Panel that provides basic monitoring and service controls.

Basic Repair & Diagnostics.

Thoughts

So that’s a little background info on my current server setup and working with the relatively new (ve) VPS. No complaints to report of thus far and it was exactly what I was looking for: a no frills, simple server that lets me do everything myself. While I was in the end working with a typical LAMP setup (albeit with some nginx mixed in there), the (ve) and related offerings from competitors are aimed at customization and the ability to adapt the server to fit any need from Python projects with Django all the way to using Yaws to serve up Erlang apps.

Would you be in the market for a developer inspired VPS that requires you to do all the heavy lifting at the benefit of extreme customization? Who is your current webhosting provider and what kind of hosting needs do you have? What framework/software/stack does your server run?

Media Temple has listened to the masses and finally made a VPS offering aimed at developers and advanced users. While their (dv) Dedicated-Virtual VPS offerings allowed users to have root access and the ability to modify much of the installed software, it was still a fairly turnkey solution: create a new account, transfer files/databases over and everything is ready to go. It also ran Parallels Plesk control panel which sys admins and developers unanimously seem to despise for a mixture of Plesk being a resource hog as well as only working well for out-of-the-box configurations and becoming a burden with custom setups — say, a Rails app. There is a large market for tech-savvy folks that prefer to handle all aspects of server setup and administration themselves. Enter the (ve) Virtual Environment.

A new product series has been created, ProDev, which caters to the side of our customer base that wishes to take hosting a step further. These users want more controls and low-level options. Therefore, we’re working on new ProDev products, such as an API, CDN and Advanced DNS, that compliment (ve) Server.— (mt)

You know who these people are — they typically congregate around Linode, Amazon EC2 and Slicehost services. They know exactly what OS and solution stack they want to use, their favorite kernel version and so on. After having a more than a few issues with their (gs) Grid-Server, Media Temple needs for this latest (ve) offering to catch on. Here’s why I think it will.

Full Disclosure: I have been exclusively hosted with Media Temple for almost 5 years now and have a partnership with them. They often hook me up with free food whenever I’m in Culver City or at one of their events at SXSW.

(ve) Basics

(ve) Server is designed for users who have significant experience with Linux, or for those who are interested in learning. Our goal is to give customers complete control of their Virtual Environment, therefore servers are delivered with SSH only. You will control and install all software.

In regards to hardware, the (ve) is far from commodity hardware with SAS disks in RAID 10 but I digress; if you want to read more about specs visit their site. Media Temple lets you install Ubuntu LTS, Ubuntu, Fedora release 12, Debian and CentOS distributions on (ve) servers. After choosing what OS you want installed on the server and waiting about 10 minutes to have it provisioned, you get to SSH into a basic Linux installation. Nothing is pre-installed. This gives you the freedom (or burden, if you are relatively new to Linux and systems administration) to setup everything on your own.

Now you get the point of the (ve) server — you run the show and know your way around Linux for the most part. Media Temple has several guides online that help with basic setup. For those considering such a developer-friendly VPS option, be warned that a solid setup is at least a few hours away of installing packages, configuring files, transferring files, importing databases, configuring more files, securing everything, monitoring for a while and tweaking for optimal performance.

As far as pricing is concerned, the (ve) is priced competitively. Below is simple comparison on the pricing of the closest offering to a 1GB RAM VPS:

Linode, Slicehost, Media Temple

Media Temple’s logic is that they can afford to price the (ve) as such since advanced users (the target market) are much less likely to require technical support.

My Setup & Experience so far

This blog has been hosted on a (dv) 3.5 with 2GB of RAM (though I think you temporarily get access to 3GB of RAM for under high load) for over 2 years now. That setup started getting finicky and needed daily or sometimes twice daily Apache restarts or it would crash on its own. Needless to say, it was time to start from scratch with a clean setup — much like how I tend to completely reinstall OS X every year or so (or back in my Windows XP days, every 6-9 months).

(ve) Control Panel in the Media Temple Account Center

I was not much of a CentOS fan on the (dv) server, so I chose to setup my (ve) with Ubuntu. Once the (ve) server was added to my Media Temple account, I enabled root SSH access and SSH’d in, with my first objective being creating a new user, adding that user to the sudoers file and configuring SSH to disallow root SSH login. This will probably sound familiar to you if you have tinkered with a fresh Linux server install before. If not, several of Media Temple’s guides will come in handy but for the most part apt-get is your friend.

A while later I had a simple LAMP setup with Webmin (lightweight control panel) configured on my (ve) server. I temporarily changed an Amazon S3 blog backup to public, downloaded it on the (ve), uncompressed the files into the public web folder then imported a recent database dump with Sequel Pro. The last step was logging into the Account Center and changing the zone file to point to the new server. I had set the TTL low so the DNS propagated quickly and the new server was live within minutes.

(ve) Server Guide

Then I got in touch with Chris Lea at Media Temple who looked over my setup and offered a few suggestions and made some adjustments. Notably he installed and configured nginx as a reverse proxy to serve static files — images, javascript, CSS, HTML, XML, et cetera — while letting Apache handle the dynamic stuff. I prefer this setup over a wholly nginx configuration so that all my .htaccess rewrite rules would remain in place (and not need to be rewritten for nginx) and so that various WordPress plugins that need their own rewrite rules would not break when they needed to tweak those settings. Also, since I use a caching plugin that creates static HTML cache files, nginx will end up serving most pages, leaving resource-hogging Apache with little to do. The best of both worlds in my opinion.

Chris also installed APC for PHP, set expires headers for all image types to 1 day and enabled compression for text based file types (I wrote about compression for Apache a while ago). And finally, munin was installed for resource monitoring.

All said and done, the server is now using around 400MB of RAM most of the time. Compare that to using at least 2GB of RAM at idle with my last (unstable) server setup and I’m rather delighted. Other performance options I had considered were Squid (but was told nginx is better for a reverse proxy role) and Varnish. Of course, this blog does not receive anywhere near the amount of traffic to need those kinds of advanced setups.

While the (ve) box does not come with a hefty, resource-intense control panel like Plesk included on (dv) servers, it does come with Parallels Power Panel that provides basic monitoring and service controls.

Basic Repair & Diagnostics.

Thoughts

So that’s a little background info on my current server setup and working with the relatively new (ve) VPS. No complaints to report of thus far and it was exactly what I was looking for: a no frills, simple server that lets me do everything myself. While I was in the end working with a typical LAMP setup (albeit with some nginx mixed in there), the (ve) and related offerings from competitors are aimed at customization and the ability to adapt the server to fit any need from Python projects with Django all the way to using Yaws to serve up Erlang apps.

Would you be in the market for a developer inspired VPS that requires you to do all the heavy lifting at the benefit of extreme customization? Who is your current webhosting provider and what kind of hosting needs do you have? What framework/software/stack does your server run?

Media Temple has listened to the masses and finally made a VPS offering aimed at developers and advanced users. While their (dv) Dedicated-Virtual VPS offerings allowed users to have root access and the ability to modify much of the installed software, it was still a fairly turnkey solution: create a new account, transfer files/databases over and everything is ready to go. It also ran Parallels Plesk control panel which sys admins and developers unanimously seem to despise for a mixture of Plesk being a resource hog as well as only working well for out-of-the-box configurations and becoming a burden with custom setups — say, a Rails app. There is a large market for tech-savvy folks that prefer to handle all aspects of server setup and administration themselves. Enter the (ve) Virtual Environment.

A new product series has been created, ProDev, which caters to the side of our customer base that wishes to take hosting a step further. These users want more controls and low-level options. Therefore, we’re working on new ProDev products, such as an API, CDN and Advanced DNS, that compliment (ve) Server.— (mt)

You know who these people are — they typically congregate around Linode, Amazon EC2 and Slicehost services. They know exactly what OS and solution stack they want to use, their favorite kernel version and so on. After having a more than a few issues with their (gs) Grid-Server, Media Temple needs for this latest (ve) offering to catch on. Here’s why I think it will.

Full Disclosure: I have been exclusively hosted with Media Temple for almost 5 years now and have a partnership with them. They often hook me up with free food whenever I’m in Culver City or at one of their events at SXSW.

(ve) Basics

(ve) Server is designed for users who have significant experience with Linux, or for those who are interested in learning. Our goal is to give customers complete control of their Virtual Environment, therefore servers are delivered with SSH only. You will control and install all software.

In regards to hardware, the (ve) is far from commodity hardware with SAS disks in RAID 10 but I digress; if you want to read more about specs visit their site. Media Temple lets you install Ubuntu LTS, Ubuntu, Fedora release 12, Debian and CentOS distributions on (ve) servers. After choosing what OS you want installed on the server and waiting about 10 minutes to have it provisioned, you get to SSH into a basic Linux installation. Nothing is pre-installed. This gives you the freedom (or burden, if you are relatively new to Linux and systems administration) to setup everything on your own.

Now you get the point of the (ve) server — you run the show and know your way around Linux for the most part. Media Temple has several guides online that help with basic setup. For those considering such a developer-friendly VPS option, be warned that a solid setup is at least a few hours away of installing packages, configuring files, transferring files, importing databases, configuring more files, securing everything, monitoring for a while and tweaking for optimal performance.

As far as pricing is concerned, the (ve) is priced competitively. Below is simple comparison on the pricing of the closest offering to a 1GB RAM VPS:

Linode, Slicehost, Media Temple

Media Temple’s logic is that they can afford to price the (ve) as such since advanced users (the target market) are much less likely to require technical support.

My Setup & Experience so far

This blog has been hosted on a (dv) 3.5 with 2GB of RAM (though I think you temporarily get access to 3GB of RAM for under high load) for over 2 years now. That setup started getting finicky and needed daily or sometimes twice daily Apache restarts or it would crash on its own. Needless to say, it was time to start from scratch with a clean setup — much like how I tend to completely reinstall OS X every year or so (or back in my Windows XP days, every 6-9 months).

(ve) Control Panel in the Media Temple Account Center

I was not much of a CentOS fan on the (dv) server, so I chose to setup my (ve) with Ubuntu. Once the (ve) server was added to my Media Temple account, I enabled root SSH access and SSH’d in, with my first objective being creating a new user, adding that user to the sudoers file and configuring SSH to disallow root SSH login. This will probably sound familiar to you if you have tinkered with a fresh Linux server install before. If not, several of Media Temple’s guides will come in handy but for the most part apt-get is your friend.

A while later I had a simple LAMP setup with Webmin (lightweight control panel) configured on my (ve) server. I temporarily changed an Amazon S3 blog backup to public, downloaded it on the (ve), uncompressed the files into the public web folder then imported a recent database dump with Sequel Pro. The last step was logging into the Account Center and changing the zone file to point to the new server. I had set the TTL low so the DNS propagated quickly and the new server was live within minutes.

(ve) Server Guide

Then I got in touch with Chris Lea at Media Temple who looked over my setup and offered a few suggestions and made some adjustments. Notably he installed and configured nginx as a reverse proxy to serve static files — images, javascript, CSS, HTML, XML, et cetera — while letting Apache handle the dynamic stuff. I prefer this setup over a wholly nginx configuration so that all my .htaccess rewrite rules would remain in place (and not need to be rewritten for nginx) and so that various WordPress plugins that need their own rewrite rules would not break when they needed to tweak those settings. Also, since I use a caching plugin that creates static HTML cache files, nginx will end up serving most pages, leaving resource-hogging Apache with little to do. The best of both worlds in my opinion.

Chris also installed APC for PHP, set expires headers for all image types to 1 day and enabled compression for text based file types (I wrote about compression for Apache a while ago). And finally, munin was installed for resource monitoring.

All said and done, the server is now using around 400MB of RAM most of the time. Compare that to using at least 2GB of RAM at idle with my last (unstable) server setup and I’m rather delighted. Other performance options I had considered were Squid (but was told nginx is better for a reverse proxy role) and Varnish. Of course, this blog does not receive anywhere near the amount of traffic to need those kinds of advanced setups.

While the (ve) box does not come with a hefty, resource-intense control panel like Plesk included on (dv) servers, it does come with Parallels Power Panel that provides basic monitoring and service controls.

Basic Repair & Diagnostics.

Thoughts

So that’s a little background info on my current server setup and working with the relatively new (ve) VPS. No complaints to report of thus far and it was exactly what I was looking for: a no frills, simple server that lets me do everything myself. While I was in the end working with a typical LAMP setup (albeit with some nginx mixed in there), the (ve) and related offerings from competitors are aimed at customization and the ability to adapt the server to fit any need from Python projects with Django all the way to using Yaws to serve up Erlang apps.

Would you be in the market for a developer inspired VPS that requires you to do all the heavy lifting at the benefit of extreme customization? Who is your current webhosting provider and what kind of hosting needs do you have? What framework/software/stack does your server run?

Media Temple has listened to the masses and finally made a VPS offering aimed at developers and advanced users. While their (dv) Dedicated-Virtual VPS offerings allowed users to have root access and the ability to modify much of the installed software, it was still a fairly turnkey solution: create a new account, transfer files/databases over and everything is ready to go. It also ran Parallels Plesk control panel which sys admins and developers unanimously seem to despise for a mixture of Plesk being a resource hog as well as only working well for out-of-the-box configurations and becoming a burden with custom setups — say, a Rails app. There is a large market for tech-savvy folks that prefer to handle all aspects of server setup and administration themselves. Enter the (ve) Virtual Environment.

A new product series has been created, ProDev, which caters to the side of our customer base that wishes to take hosting a step further. These users want more controls and low-level options. Therefore, we’re working on new ProDev products, such as an API, CDN and Advanced DNS, that compliment (ve) Server.— (mt)

You know who these people are — they typically congregate around Linode, Amazon EC2 and Slicehost services. They know exactly what OS and solution stack they want to use, their favorite kernel version and so on. After having a more than a few issues with their (gs) Grid-Server, Media Temple needs for this latest (ve) offering to catch on. Here’s why I think it will.

Full Disclosure: I have been exclusively hosted with Media Temple for almost 5 years now and have a partnership with them. They often hook me up with free food whenever I’m in Culver City or at one of their events at SXSW.

(ve) Basics

(ve) Server is designed for users who have significant experience with Linux, or for those who are interested in learning. Our goal is to give customers complete control of their Virtual Environment, therefore servers are delivered with SSH only. You will control and install all software.

In regards to hardware, the (ve) is far from commodity hardware with SAS disks in RAID 10 but I digress; if you want to read more about specs visit their site. Media Temple lets you install Ubuntu LTS, Ubuntu, Fedora release 12, Debian and CentOS distributions on (ve) servers. After choosing what OS you want installed on the server and waiting about 10 minutes to have it provisioned, you get to SSH into a basic Linux installation. Nothing is pre-installed. This gives you the freedom (or burden, if you are relatively new to Linux and systems administration) to setup everything on your own.

Now you get the point of the (ve) server — you run the show and know your way around Linux for the most part. Media Temple has several guides online that help with basic setup. For those considering such a developer-friendly VPS option, be warned that a solid setup is at least a few hours away of installing packages, configuring files, transferring files, importing databases, configuring more files, securing everything, monitoring for a while and tweaking for optimal performance.

As far as pricing is concerned, the (ve) is priced competitively. Below is simple comparison on the pricing of the closest offering to a 1GB RAM VPS:

Linode, Slicehost, Media Temple

Media Temple’s logic is that they can afford to price the (ve) as such since advanced users (the target market) are much less likely to require technical support.

My Setup & Experience so far

This blog has been hosted on a (dv) 3.5 with 2GB of RAM (though I think you temporarily get access to 3GB of RAM for under high load) for over 2 years now. That setup started getting finicky and needed daily or sometimes twice daily Apache restarts or it would crash on its own. Needless to say, it was time to start from scratch with a clean setup — much like how I tend to completely reinstall OS X every year or so (or back in my Windows XP days, every 6-9 months).

(ve) Control Panel in the Media Temple Account Center

I was not much of a CentOS fan on the (dv) server, so I chose to setup my (ve) with Ubuntu. Once the (ve) server was added to my Media Temple account, I enabled root SSH access and SSH’d in, with my first objective being creating a new user, adding that user to the sudoers file and configuring SSH to disallow root SSH login. This will probably sound familiar to you if you have tinkered with a fresh Linux server install before. If not, several of Media Temple’s guides will come in handy but for the most part apt-get is your friend.

A while later I had a simple LAMP setup with Webmin (lightweight control panel) configured on my (ve) server. I temporarily changed an Amazon S3 blog backup to public, downloaded it on the (ve), uncompressed the files into the public web folder then imported a recent database dump with Sequel Pro. The last step was logging into the Account Center and changing the zone file to point to the new server. I had set the TTL low so the DNS propagated quickly and the new server was live within minutes.

(ve) Server Guide

Then I got in touch with Chris Lea at Media Temple who looked over my setup and offered a few suggestions and made some adjustments. Notably he installed and configured nginx as a reverse proxy to serve static files — images, javascript, CSS, HTML, XML, et cetera — while letting Apache handle the dynamic stuff. I prefer this setup over a wholly nginx configuration so that all my .htaccess rewrite rules would remain in place (and not need to be rewritten for nginx) and so that various WordPress plugins that need their own rewrite rules would not break when they needed to tweak those settings. Also, since I use a caching plugin that creates static HTML cache files, nginx will end up serving most pages, leaving resource-hogging Apache with little to do. The best of both worlds in my opinion.

Chris also installed APC for PHP, set expires headers for all image types to 1 day and enabled compression for text based file types (I wrote about compression for Apache a while ago). And finally, munin was installed for resource monitoring.

All said and done, the server is now using around 400MB of RAM most of the time. Compare that to using at least 2GB of RAM at idle with my last (unstable) server setup and I’m rather delighted. Other performance options I had considered were Squid (but was told nginx is better for a reverse proxy role) and Varnish. Of course, this blog does not receive anywhere near the amount of traffic to need those kinds of advanced setups.

While the (ve) box does not come with a hefty, resource-intense control panel like Plesk included on (dv) servers, it does come with Parallels Power Panel that provides basic monitoring and service controls.

Basic Repair & Diagnostics.

Thoughts

So that’s a little background info on my current server setup and working with the relatively new (ve) VPS. No complaints to report of thus far and it was exactly what I was looking for: a no frills, simple server that lets me do everything myself. While I was in the end working with a typical LAMP setup (albeit with some nginx mixed in there), the (ve) and related offerings from competitors are aimed at customization and the ability to adapt the server to fit any need from Python projects with Django all the way to using Yaws to serve up Erlang apps.

Would you be in the market for a developer inspired VPS that requires you to do all the heavy lifting at the benefit of extreme customization? Who is your current webhosting provider and what kind of hosting needs do you have? What framework/software/stack does your server run?

Early last month I detailed my plans for moving to California for friends, a change of scenery and of course the acclaimed high-tech hub in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many have contacted me asking to share my experiences on what it is like to move cross-country — in particular to San Francisco — as they were looking to do the same pretty soon. I will attempt to chronicle my journey and adaptation to San Francisco in this and possibly future blog posts.

Apartment Hunting

I first scheduled a weeklong trip to San Francisco to get more oriented with the city and find out what neighborhoods I liked. I told myself I would not depart until I had signed a lease and received the keys to my new apartment. I had planned on couch surfing at several friends’ apartments but Noah Kagan (with whom I had worked on some Mint.com marketing years ago) of the not quite launched AppSumo was gracious enough to let me stay on his couch for the entire week. Once I got settled in on Noah’s couch I spent several hours each day browsing two great apartment listing mashups — PadMapper and HotPads.

My first objective was to get a sense for what neighborhood I wanted to live in. A bunch of Googling, walking around and talking with friends helped me figure that out. The SF Gate has a great section explaining neighborhoods, their restaurants, attractions and so on. I narrowed down my search to Hayes Valley, Duboce Triangle and the Mission. For example, here’s a snippet of what SF Gate says about the Mission:

The Internet boom brought on heavy gentrification — trendy restaurants and boutiques blazed in, rents shot up and many Latinos and artists were displaced by the influx of highly paid young professionals. Today, there’s an interesting mix of places that survived the changes and new arrivals that are trying to make the Mission home. […] Generally speaking, the 24th Street area is the culturally rich heart of the Mission, the stretch from Dolores Street through to Valencia Street is young and upscale, the area around 16th and Valencia streets hops with nightlife and the industrial area near Bryant Street has some hip, trendy restaurants.

It did not take long before I needed to adjust my expectations to fit within my budget. I was expecting to land a 600-700 square foot 1-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood for around $1,200. Yeah, that was not going to happen. In Atlanta I leased a 723 square foot 1-bedroom loft for $975/month in a favorable part of town with included parking, in-unit washer and dryer, microwave, garbage disposal, central heat and air conditioning and a dishwasher. The same in San Francisco would cost around $1,800-2,200/month and very likely not include several of those amenities. My priorities changed and I focused instead on finding a 400-500 square foot studio with in-building laundry. That was going to be enough of a challenge.

The first few days were hectic to say the least. I would browse for a while, find something decent, then call to ask questions only to be let down every single time. One particular place seemed to fit the bill then I called to find out it was under 300 square feet. Another place seemed great online and in the pictures then I started walking in the neighborhood and quickly realized it was not an area I wanted to live in (16th & Mission – near the BART station). This happened a few more times. It then became a game of catching new listings as they were posted; so I was online a lot that week. If I wasn’t restricted to my short timeframe (I had to move before my lease was up in Atlanta), the best solution would be to setup a script to notify me of new listings that matched my preferences. That’s exactly what Nick Bushak did for a private Google group of hackers that were trying to find a summer “Hacker House.” I was initially looking to live with them but the timing did not work out.

Having something or someone else search for you is probably one of the better ways to deal with long-term apartment hunting. For example, Noah outsourced his apartment search to an overseas assistant for $4/hour that found listings according to his preferences, made viewing appointments and added them to his calendar.

On the fourth day of apartment hunting I stumbled upon a great listing within hours of its posting. It was a studio in the Mission District with a secured parking garage (for extra of course), newer construction (likely 1970s — much better than the 1920s buildings I had seen in most listings), RFID entry and in-building laundry facilities. I went on Twitter to ask my friends what they thought of the exact area and all seemed to like it.

Listing photos are incredibly deceiving… this lamp was not included with the apartment.

I scheduled a viewing appointment for the same day, in between two other apartment viewings I had booked earlier. I got to the neighborhood an hour early, walked around and stopped by a coffee shop with lots of character that Nivi recommended. I sat down and chatted with some of the locals to see what they thought of the area and what it was like at night. It turned out I had been chatting with someone that graduated from UGA (my alma mater’s rival). Then I went to the apartment viewing and was pleased to hear the leasing agent say I was the first person to view the apartment. She also mentioned many Google employees live in the building since their shuttle picks up nearby. The kitchen was smaller than I had hoped for — actually the entire place was smaller than I had in mind (probably 375-400 square feet at best) — and the oven was tiny (I cook a lot), but I was going to deal with it. I filled out the paperwork that day.

A tiny studio but definitely livable. Notice custom Cat 6 stapled to the wall. Only took three tries to get the T568A pinouts right. In hindsight investing in a dual-band wireless N router (currently just 802.11g via WRT54G2 — will install DD-WRT soon just tonight my WRT54G2 died and I swiftly replaced it with a 1TB Time Capsule) would have worked almost as well, but the AirPort in my MacBook Pro still needs cycling fairly often.

Ikea desk and chair were just under $100. I will be keeping an eye out for deadpooled startups that sell their Herman Millers for cheap.

The mechanics of actually getting them to approve me for the apartment requires some explaining. Landlords and leasing agents in San Francisco are rather aggressive. Many apartments have open house viewings often. I had heard of some nightmare situations when it came to these open houses; that everyone would have their checkbooks out, proof of income, pay stubs, credit reports printed out and were ready to sign the lease right there. I was particularly nervous about the whole situation as I was unemployed when looking for an apartment and had no verifiable income that I could list. The only thing I had in my favor was a good credit score from the three credit bureaus. I was able to find this out easily with American Express CreditSecure credit report monitoring ($2 for the first month, then cancel immediately). The FTC lists authorized, free ways to acquire your credit report but I am not sure whether their recommended service can get the report the same day. Some apartment listings state they will waive the application fee if you come to the viewing with a recent credit report in hand.

I got a call back from the leasing agent saying that the landlord gave me two options: I could get a cosigner or since I had a good credit score they would let me sign the lease if I provided two months rent (2x security deposit) in addition to the first month’s prorated rent. I chose the latter option as it would be quicker and help my credit score in the long-run. That meant I had get a hefty cashier’s check made before I got the keys to the apartment.

In no particular order, here are some random apartment things I learned during my hunt and lease signing process:

You don’t need air conditioning in San Francisco. It’s mid-May and I have my heater on right now. Though I did purchase a small Vornado fan (“air circulator”) for the few summer days that it does reach 80 degrees in the city.

In-unit washer and dryer is just about impossible to find. Same with dishwasher. If you find an in-building washer and dryer, you’re sitting pretty.

Just about everything is early 1900s construction and has hardwood floors. In fact many listings love pointing out period details, stating Edwardian this or Victorian that.

Many apartments with hardwood floor state in the lease that tenants must cover 80% of the floor with carpet to alleviate noise issues for neighbors. To give you an idea, a 6′ by 10′ carpet from Ikea costs $199 and you would need two to make it look like 80% of the floor was covered. Keep that in mind. Of course there are definitely cheaper places to buy carpet.

You get two pamphlets when you sign your lease: how to deal with lead-based paint and how to survive natural disasters like fires and earthquakes.

While getting renter’s insurance you will be asked if you want to buy earthquake insurance (doubles the price). The local Best Buy sells “Quake Straps” to fasten your TV to the wall.

It’s important to ask the leasing agent if previous tenants have (successfully) had DSL/Cable installed prior. Buildings built in the early 1900′s don’t have the best wiring and that may affect signal quality and thus performance.

There is an ISP called Web-Pass that offers FTTH for certain properties. Check to see if those properties have any apartment listings because the service is great: 45 or 100 megabit. Otherwise Comcast offers up to 50 megabits down with their “Extreme 50″ plan — if the 250GB/month bandwidth cap does not bother you.

It takes Comcast at least a week to come for an installation appointment. If you’re lucky one of your friends will have a Sprint Overdrive or Verizon MiFi you can borrow.

Buying a bed? Most places deliver same day for free (but it’s implied you tip them). I got my queen, box spring and frame from a place called Sleep Train.

Obvious Pro Tip: Save up before heading out to San Francisco while unemployed. If you plan on living by yourself, I would say at least $5,000-7,500 would be a decent number to have in mind if you can live somewhat frugally. Otherwise, and especially if you are moving cross-country, $8,000+ would be best. Friends that have moved to San Francisco through work received ~$10k relocation bonuses, so that’s what their companies value the move at. Please leave a comment below if you have thoughts on this.

Moving

#roadtrip: gas ~$350, hotels ~$370

I spent some time deciding how I wanted to move. Should I rent a U-Haul truck and car trailer to drive out? Or should I rent the U-Haul and have my car shipped out? Or maybe I should have my stuff sent out in a shipping crate while I drive out or perhaps I just leave the car at home and fly out? Eventually I went back to one of my favorite Paul Graham essays, Stuff, and read it again. I took that to heart and sold or donated as much of my stuff as I could with ease.

Zooey, my beloved black labrador? I found her a loving new home where she will be much happier than in a small San Francisco studio apartment while I am out much of the day.

Zooey’s new owner is a long-distance runner and gives Zooey all the exercise she needs. Farewell pup.

Surprisingly, I sold almost everything through Twitter and Tumblr. This made sense financially as well — a shipping container would have cost $1,600 for port to port delivery which requires renting a truck to load and unload, or $2,400 for door to door delivery. Another alternative would have been shipping some boxes on a pallet. I believe that runs in the $400-$600 range.

A few small boxes, a suitcase and my laptop remained. And my AT&T 3G MicroCell because their network sucks everywhere I go and at the very least I want good signal at home. If you are in the same boat, I highly recommend you consider the MicroCell. Aside from a few dropped calls when my iPhone switches between the MicroCell and a regular cell tower, I am very happy with the MicroCell.

I can’t say thanks enough to everyone in Atlanta for coming out to Startup Drinks to say goodbye to me! Atlanta tech blog extraordinaire TechDrawl covered the event and chatted with me beforehand on why I decided to make the big move.

Atlanta-based rapper T.I. made an appearance of sorts at the gathering; his rap studio Grand Hustle Records happens to be next door.

T.I. posing with his Ferrari 599 ($320k+) after @marisasharpe asked him if I could take his picture. Note his new white Porsche Panamera in the background — he mentioned that car in the song “Winner” feat Jamie Foxx and Justin Timberlake. That’s his second Panamera; he also bought his lady friend a black Porsche Panamera Turbo ($130k+). </car_talk>

And some obligatory road trip pictures.

Getting close to the desert

The landscape started getting interesting in New Mexico. Everything else East made for a boring drive.

Pipe Creek Vista — Grand Canyon, South Rim in Arizona

This picture definitely does not do the Grand Canyon justice. I highly recommend visiting.

The beautiful Hoover Dam

Crossing the Bay Bridge

The City

The first thing I wanted to learn about San Francisco was getting around with public transportation. Coming from Atlanta, which is definitely a car city, I had lots of catching up to do. For those unfamiliar with transportation in the bay area, there are quite a few options: Caltrain, BART, Muni, AC transit, VTA light rail (south bay) in addition to taxis, ZipCar and City CarShare. If you take public transit with any regularity you will probably want to get a TransLink card (soon to be renamed Clipper). Otherwise keep some crisp dollar bills on hand at all times for Muni. There’s nothing worse than holding up a line of people trying to get on the bus while you try to cram in two crumpled dollars into the machine.

Left to Right: monthly Muni pass ($60. getting phased out by TransLink), BART pass (TransLink can also do this), TransLink card, ZipCard.

Other things I’ve learned:

Last Caltrain out of San Francisco leaves at midnight. Muni runs 24 hours. BART stops running at midnight and resumes 4am on weekdays, 6am on Saturdays and 8am on Sundays.

It’s always chilly. I have yet to get a chance to wear shorts. I went to Union Square and got some more jeans the first week. I will probably need to get another windbreaker. Gabor told me he quickly learned that everyone out here wears button-up shirts when going out, so he had to beef up his wardrobe in that regard.

It takes about 30 minutes to get to downtown from the Mission on Muni (only 2-3 miles). On BART or underground Muni rail it’s more like 10 minutes.

The most I’ve had to pay to get across town (well, almost across town: Mission to North Beach) via taxi was $15. Mission to downtown is about $8 (not including tip). (First 1/5th mile is $3.10 with every additional 1/5th mile or minute adding 45 cents.)

Yellow and Luxor cabs accept credit/debit cards.

Keep an eye out for some parts of Market Street that have taxi/bus-only left lanes.

Driving in San Francisco takes some getting used to because the traffic lights are usually on the sides, not hanging above the intersections.

Finding a cab in SoMa once a Giants game lets out is rather difficult.

iPhone Google Maps has excellent public transit information but can drastically tell you different routes just to get you on a bus/train sooner, even if the trip might be longer. Tinker with changing your departure time. Alternatively there are many iPhone apps for transportation info: Taxi Magic, MyCaltrain, iCommute SF, Pocket Muni, iBart Live. NextMuni.com is also useful.

Do not fall asleep on BART or you will miss the Embarcadero stop and end up in Oakland. I speak from experience and a series of entertaining tweets.

Two Ikeas: Emeryville just across the Bay Bridge and in East Palo Alto

There is a Pinkberry near Stanford campus. Fraiche Yogurt in Palo Alto is great too — Steve Jobs has been spotted there before. Watch the Scoble interview.

Tea tasting is the thing to do in Chinatown. Also, Ten Ren at 949 Grant Ave is a great place for $3 tapioca bubble tea.

People here were not joking around; AT&T is horrible in San Francisco. In particular I have noticed many dead spots around the Mission.

Ocean Beach in San Francisco near Cliff House and Sutro Baths

Driving down Lombard like a tourist.

In Short: For someone coming from Atlanta, SF Public transportation is great. I brought a car out here and now I’m already thinking about getting rid of it. Related: parallel parking on a steep hill with a manual transmission is annoying.

Thoughts

I have now been in San Francisco for exactly two weeks and I am in love with the city. Hopefully this honeymoon period does not fizzle away too soon.

Any questions? Have any of you made a cross-country or other such long-distance move before? Reading this and live in San Francisco? Let’s meetup some time.

Early last month I detailed my plans for moving to California for friends, a change of scenery and of course the acclaimed high-tech hub in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many have contacted me asking to share my experiences on what it is like to move cross-country — in particular to San Francisco — as they were looking to do the same pretty soon. I will attempt to chronicle my journey and adaptation to San Francisco in this and possibly future blog posts.

Apartment Hunting

I first scheduled a weeklong trip to San Francisco to get more oriented with the city and find out what neighborhoods I liked. I told myself I would not depart until I had signed a lease and received the keys to my new apartment. I had planned on couch surfing at several friends’ apartments but Noah Kagan (with whom I had worked on some Mint.com marketing years ago) of the not quite launched AppSumo was gracious enough to let me stay on his couch for the entire week. Once I got settled in on Noah’s couch I spent several hours each day browsing two great apartment listing mashups — PadMapper and HotPads.

My first objective was to get a sense for what neighborhood I wanted to live in. A bunch of Googling, walking around and talking with friends helped me figure that out. The SF Gate has a great section explaining neighborhoods, their restaurants, attractions and so on. I narrowed down my search to Hayes Valley, Duboce Triangle and the Mission. For example, here’s a snippet of what SF Gate says about the Mission:

The Internet boom brought on heavy gentrification — trendy restaurants and boutiques blazed in, rents shot up and many Latinos and artists were displaced by the influx of highly paid young professionals. Today, there’s an interesting mix of places that survived the changes and new arrivals that are trying to make the Mission home. […] Generally speaking, the 24th Street area is the culturally rich heart of the Mission, the stretch from Dolores Street through to Valencia Street is young and upscale, the area around 16th and Valencia streets hops with nightlife and the industrial area near Bryant Street has some hip, trendy restaurants.

It did not take long before I needed to adjust my expectations to fit within my budget. I was expecting to land a 600-700 square foot 1-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood for around $1,200. Yeah, that was not going to happen. In Atlanta I leased a 723 square foot 1-bedroom loft for $975/month in a favorable part of town with included parking, in-unit washer and dryer, microwave, garbage disposal, central heat and air conditioning and a dishwasher. The same in San Francisco would cost around $1,800-2,200/month and very likely not include several of those amenities. My priorities changed and I focused instead on finding a 400-500 square foot studio with in-building laundry. That was going to be enough of a challenge.

The first few days were hectic to say the least. I would browse for a while, find something decent, then call to ask questions only to be let down every single time. One particular place seemed to fit the bill then I called to find out it was under 300 square feet. Another place seemed great online and in the pictures then I started walking in the neighborhood and quickly realized it was not an area I wanted to live in (16th & Mission - near the BART station). This happened a few more times. It then became a game of catching new listings as they were posted; so I was online a lot that week. If I wasn’t restricted to my short timeframe (I had to move before my lease was up in Atlanta), the best solution would be to setup a script to notify me of new listings that matched my preferences. That’s exactly what Nick Bushak did for a private Google group of hackers that were trying to find a summer “Hacker House.” I was initially looking to live with them but the timing did not work out.

Having something or someone else search for you is probably one of the better ways to deal with long-term apartment hunting. For example, Noah outsourced his apartment search to an overseas assistant for $4/hour that found listings according to his preferences, made viewing appointments and added them to his calendar.

On the fourth day of apartment hunting I stumbled upon a great listing within hours of its posting. It was a studio in the Mission District with a secured parking garage (for extra of course), newer construction (likely 1970s — much better than the 1920s buildings I had seen in most listings), RFID entry and in-building laundry facilities. I went on Twitter to ask my friends what they thought of the exact area and all seemed to like it.

Listing photos are incredibly deceiving… this lamp was not included with the apartment.

I scheduled a viewing appointment for the same day, in between two other apartment viewings I had booked earlier. I got to the neighborhood an hour early, walked around and stopped by a coffee shop with lots of character that Nivi recommended. I sat down and chatted with some of the locals to see what they thought of the area and what it was like at night. It turned out I had been chatting with someone that graduated from UGA (my alma mater’s rival). Then I went to the apartment viewing and was pleased to hear the leasing agent say I was the first person to view the apartment. She also mentioned many Google employees live in the building since their shuttle picks up nearby. The kitchen was smaller than I had hoped for — actually the entire place was smaller than I had in mind (probably 375-400 square feet at best) — and the oven was tiny (I cook a lot), but I was going to deal with it. I filled out the paperwork that day.

A tiny studio but definitely livable. Notice custom Cat 6 stapled to the wall. Only took three tries to get the T568A pinouts right. In hindsight investing in a dual-band wireless N router (currently just 802.11g via WRT54G2 — will install DD-WRT soon just tonight my WRT54G2 died and I swiftly replaced it with a 1TB Time Capsule) would have worked almost as well, but the AirPort in my MacBook Pro still needs cycling fairly often.

Ikea desk and chair were just under $100. I will be keeping an eye out for deadpooled startups that sell their Herman Millers for cheap.

The mechanics of actually getting them to approve me for the apartment requires some explaining. Landlords and leasing agents in San Francisco are rather aggressive. Many apartments have open house viewings often. I had heard of some nightmare situations when it came to these open houses; that everyone would have their checkbooks out, proof of income, pay stubs, credit reports printed out and were ready to sign the lease right there. I was particularly nervous about the whole situation as I was unemployed when looking for an apartment and had no verifiable income that I could list. The only thing I had in my favor was a good credit score from the three credit bureaus. I was able to find this out easily with American Express CreditSecure credit report monitoring ($2 for the first month, then cancel immediately). The FTC lists authorized, free ways to acquire your credit report but I am not sure whether their recommended service can get the report the same day. Some apartment listings state they will waive the application fee if you come to the viewing with a recent credit report in hand.

I got a call back from the leasing agent saying that the landlord gave me two options: I could get a cosigner or since I had a good credit score they would let me sign the lease if I provided two months rent (2x security deposit) in addition to the first month’s prorated rent. I chose the latter option as it would be quicker and help my credit score in the long-run. That meant I had get a hefty cashier’s check made before I got the keys to the apartment.

In no particular order, here are some random apartment things I learned during my hunt and lease signing process:

You don’t need air conditioning in San Francisco. It’s mid-May and I have my heater on right now. Though I did purchase a small Vornado fan (”air circulator”) for the few summer days that it does reach 80 degrees in the city.

In-unit washer and dryer is just about impossible to find. Same with dishwasher. If you find an in-building washer and dryer, you’re sitting pretty.

Just about everything is early 1900s construction and has hardwood floors. In fact many listings love pointing out period details, stating Edwardian this or Victorian that.

Many apartments with hardwood floor state in the lease that tenants must cover 80% of the floor with carpet to alleviate noise issues for neighbors. To give you an idea, a 6′ by 10′ carpet from Ikea costs $199 and you would need two to make it look like 80% of the floor was covered. Keep that in mind. Of course there are definitely cheaper places to buy carpet.

You get two pamphlets when you sign your lease: how to deal with lead-based paint and how to survive natural disasters like fires and earthquakes.

While getting renter’s insurance you will be asked if you want to buy earthquake insurance (doubles the price). The local Best Buy sells “Quake Straps” to fasten your TV to the wall.

It’s important to ask the leasing agent if previous tenants have (successfully) had DSL/Cable installed prior. Buildings built in the early 1900’s don’t have the best wiring and that may affect signal quality and thus performance.

There is an ISP called Web-Pass that offers FTTH for certain properties. Check to see if those properties have any apartment listings because the service is great: 45 or 100 megabit. Otherwise Comcast offers up to 50 megabits down with their “Extreme 50″ plan — if the 250GB/month bandwidth cap does not bother you.

It takes Comcast at least a week to come for an installation appointment. If you’re lucky one of your friends will have a Sprint Overdrive or Verizon MiFi you can borrow.

Buying a bed? Most places deliver same day for free (but it’s implied you tip them). I got my queen, box spring and frame from a place called Sleep Train.

Obvious Pro Tip: Save up before heading out to San Francisco while unemployed. If you plan on living by yourself, I would say at least $5,000-7,500 would be a decent number to have in mind if you can live somewhat frugally. Otherwise, and especially if you are moving cross-country, $8,000+ would be best. Friends that have moved to San Francisco through work received ~$10k relocation bonuses, so that’s what their companies value the move at. Please leave a comment below if you have thoughts on this.

Moving

#roadtrip: gas ~$350, hotels ~$370

I spent some time deciding how I wanted to move. Should I rent a U-Haul truck and car trailer to drive out? Or should I rent the U-Haul and have my car shipped out? Or maybe I should have my stuff sent out in a shipping crate while I drive out or perhaps I just leave the car at home and fly out? Eventually I went back to one of my favorite Paul Graham essays, Stuff, and read it again. I took that to heart and sold or donated as much of my stuff as I could with ease.

Zooey, my beloved black labrador? I found her a loving new home where she will be much happier than in a small San Francisco studio apartment while I am out much of the day.

Zooey’s new owner is a long-distance runner and gives Zooey all the exercise she needs. Farewell pup.

Surprisingly, I sold almost everything through Twitter and Tumblr. This made sense financially as well — a shipping container would have cost $1,600 for port to port delivery which requires renting a truck to load and unload, or $2,400 for door to door delivery. Another alternative would have been shipping some boxes on a pallet. I believe that runs in the $400-$600 range.

A few small boxes, a suitcase and my laptop remained. And my AT&T 3G MicroCell because their network sucks everywhere I go and at the very least I want good signal at home. If you are in the same boat, I highly recommend you consider the MicroCell. Aside from a few dropped calls when my iPhone switches between the MicroCell and a regular cell tower, I am very happy with the MicroCell.

I can’t say thanks enough to everyone in Atlanta for coming out to Startup Drinks to say goodbye to me! Atlanta tech blog extraordinaire TechDrawl covered the event and chatted with me beforehand on why I decided to make the big move.

Atlanta-based rapper T.I. made an appearance of sorts at the gathering; his rap studio Grand Hustle Records happens to be next door.

T.I. posing with his Ferrari 599 ($320k+) after @marisasharpe asked him if I could take his picture. Note his new white Porsche Panamera in the background — he mentioned that car in the song “Winner” feat Jamie Foxx and Justin Timberlake. That’s his second Panamera; he also bought his lady friend a black Porsche Panamera Turbo ($130k+). </car_talk>

And some obligatory road trip pictures.

Getting close to the desert

The landscape started getting interesting in New Mexico. Everything else East made for a boring drive.

Pipe Creek Vista — Grand Canyon, South Rim in Arizona

This picture definitely does not do the Grand Canyon justice. I highly recommend visiting.

The beautiful Hoover Dam

Crossing the Bay Bridge

The City

The first thing I wanted to learn about San Francisco was getting around with public transportation. Coming from Atlanta, which is definitely a car city, I had lots of catching up to do. For those unfamiliar with transportation in the bay area, there are quite a few options: Caltrain, BART, Muni, AC transit, VTA light rail (south bay) in addition to taxis, ZipCar and City CarShare. If you take public transit with any regularity you will probably want to get a TransLink card (soon to be renamed Clipper). Otherwise keep some crisp dollar bills on hand at all times for Muni. There’s nothing worse than holding up a line of people trying to get on the bus while you try to cram in two crumpled dollars into the machine.

Left to Right: monthly Muni pass ($60. getting phased out by TransLink), BART pass (TransLink can also do this), TransLink card, ZipCard.

Other things I’ve learned:

Last Caltrain out of San Francisco leaves at midnight. Muni runs 24 hours. BART stops running at midnight and resumes 4am on weekdays, 6am on Saturdays and 8am on Sundays.

It’s always chilly. I have yet to get a chance to wear shorts. I went to Union Square and got some more jeans the first week. I will probably need to get another windbreaker. Gabor told me he quickly learned that everyone out here wears button-up shirts when going out, so he had to beef up his wardrobe in that regard.

It takes about 30 minutes to get to downtown from the Mission on Muni (only 2-3 miles). On BART or underground Muni rail it’s more like 10 minutes.

The most I’ve had to pay to get across town (well, almost across town: Mission to North Beach) via taxi was $15. Mission to downtown is about $8 (not including tip). (First 1/5th mile is $3.10 with every additional 1/5th mile or minute adding 45 cents.)

Yellow and Luxor cabs accept credit/debit cards.

Keep an eye out for some parts of Market Street that have taxi/bus-only left lanes.

Driving in San Francisco takes some getting used to because the traffic lights are usually on the sides, not hanging above the intersections.

Finding a cab in SoMa once a Giants game lets out is rather difficult.

iPhone Google Maps has excellent public transit information but can drastically tell you different routes just to get you on a bus/train sooner, even if the trip might be longer. Tinker with changing your departure time. Alternatively there are many iPhone apps for transportation info: Taxi Magic, MyCaltrain, iCommute SF, Pocket Muni, iBart Live. NextMuni.com is also useful.

Do not fall asleep on BART or you will miss the Embarcadero stop and end up in Oakland. I speak from experience and a series of entertaining tweets.

Two Ikeas: Emeryville just across the Bay Bridge and in East Palo Alto

There is a Pinkberry near Stanford campus. Fraiche Yogurt in Palo Alto is great too — Steve Jobs has been spotted there before. Watch the Scoble interview.

Tea tasting is the thing to do in Chinatown. Also, Ten Ren at 949 Grant Ave is a great place for $3 tapioca bubble tea.

People here were not joking around; AT&T is horrible in San Francisco. In particular I have noticed many dead spots around the Mission.

Ocean Beach in San Francisco near Cliff House and Sutro Baths

Driving down Lombard like a tourist.

In Short: For someone coming from Atlanta, SF Public transportation is great. I brought a car out here and now I’m already thinking about getting rid of it. Related: parallel parking on a steep hill with a manual transmission is annoying.

Thoughts

I have now been in San Francisco for exactly two weeks and I am in love with the city. Hopefully this honeymoon period does not fizzle away too soon.

Any questions? Have any of you made a cross-country or other such long-distance move before? Reading this and live in San Francisco? Let’s meetup some time.

Enjoy this post? Click through and leave a comment. It will make my day. Atlanta to San Francisco: What I Learned Moving Cross-Country
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Early last month I detailed my plans for moving to California for friends, a change of scenery and of course the acclaimed high-tech hub in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many have contacted me asking to share my experiences on what it is like to move cross-country — in particular to San Francisco — as they were looking to do the same pretty soon. I will attempt to chronicle my journey and adaptation to San Francisco in this and possibly future blog posts.

Apartment Hunting

I first scheduled a weeklong trip to San Francisco to get more oriented with the city and find out what neighborhoods I liked. I told myself I would not depart until I had signed a lease and received the keys to my new apartment. I had planned on couch surfing at several friends’ apartments but Noah Kagan (with whom I had worked on some Mint.com marketing years ago) of the not quite launched AppSumo was gracious enough to let me stay on his couch for the entire week. Once I got settled in on Noah’s couch I spent several hours each day browsing two great apartment listing mashups — PadMapper and HotPads.

My first objective was to get a sense for what neighborhood I wanted to live in. A bunch of Googling, walking around and talking with friends helped me figure that out. The SF Gate has a great section explaining neighborhoods, their restaurants, attractions and so on. I narrowed down my search to Hayes Valley, Duboce Triangle and the Mission. For example, here’s a snippet of what SF Gate says about the Mission:

The Internet boom brought on heavy gentrification — trendy restaurants and boutiques blazed in, rents shot up and many Latinos and artists were displaced by the influx of highly paid young professionals. Today, there’s an interesting mix of places that survived the changes and new arrivals that are trying to make the Mission home. […] Generally speaking, the 24th Street area is the culturally rich heart of the Mission, the stretch from Dolores Street through to Valencia Street is young and upscale, the area around 16th and Valencia streets hops with nightlife and the industrial area near Bryant Street has some hip, trendy restaurants.

It did not take long before I needed to adjust my expectations to fit within my budget. I was expecting to land a 600-700 square foot 1-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood for around $1,200. Yeah, that was not going to happen. In Atlanta I leased a 723 square foot 1-bedroom loft for $975/month in a favorable part of town with included parking, in-unit washer and dryer, microwave, garbage disposal, central heat and air conditioning and a dishwasher. The same in San Francisco would cost around $1,800-2,200/month and very likely not include several of those amenities. My priorities changed and I focused instead on finding a 400-500 square foot studio with in-building laundry. That was going to be enough of a challenge.

The first few days were hectic to say the least. I would browse for a while, find something decent, then call to ask questions only to be let down every single time. One particular place seemed to fit the bill then I called to find out it was under 300 square feet. Another place seemed great online and in the pictures then I started walking in the neighborhood and quickly realized it was not an area I wanted to live in (16th & Mission - near the BART station). This happened a few more times. It then became a game of catching new listings as they were posted; so I was online a lot that week. If I wasn’t restricted to my short timeframe (I had to move before my lease was up in Atlanta), the best solution would be to setup a script to notify me of new listings that matched my preferences. That’s exactly what Nick Bushak did for a private Google group of hackers that were trying to find a summer “Hacker House.” I was initially looking to live with them but the timing did not work out.

Having something or someone else search for you is probably one of the better ways to deal with long-term apartment hunting. For example, Noah outsourced his apartment search to an overseas assistant for $4/hour that found listings according to his preferences, made viewing appointments and added them to his calendar.

On the fourth day of apartment hunting I stumbled upon a great listing within hours of its posting. It was a studio in the Mission District with a secured parking garage (for extra of course), newer construction (likely 1970s — much better than the 1920s buildings I had seen in most listings), RFID entry and in-building laundry facilities. I went on Twitter to ask my friends what they thought of the exact area and all seemed to like it.

Listing photos are incredibly deceiving… this lamp was not included with the apartment.

I scheduled a viewing appointment for the same day, in between two other apartment viewings I had booked earlier. I got to the neighborhood an hour early, walked around and stopped by a coffee shop with lots of character that Nivi recommended. I sat down and chatted with some of the locals to see what they thought of the area and what it was like at night. It turned out I had been chatting with someone that graduated from UGA (my alma mater’s rival). Then I went to the apartment viewing and was pleased to hear the leasing agent say I was the first person to view the apartment. She also mentioned many Google employees live in the building since their shuttle picks up nearby. The kitchen was smaller than I had hoped for — actually the entire place was smaller than I had in mind (probably 375-400 square feet at best) — and the oven was tiny (I cook a lot), but I was going to deal with it. I filled out the paperwork that day.

A tiny studio but definitely livable. Notice custom Cat 6 stapled to the wall. Only took three tries to get the T568A pinouts right. In hindsight investing in a dual-band wireless N router (currently just 802.11g via WRT54G2 — will install DD-WRT soon just tonight my WRT54G2 died and I swiftly replaced it with a 1TB Time Capsule) would have worked almost as well, but the AirPort in my MacBook Pro still needs cycling fairly often.

Ikea desk and chair were just under $100. I will be keeping an eye out for deadpooled startups that sell their Herman Millers for cheap.

The mechanics of actually getting them to approve me for the apartment requires some explaining. Landlords and leasing agents in San Francisco are rather aggressive. Many apartments have open house viewings often. I had heard of some nightmare situations when it came to these open houses; that everyone would have their checkbooks out, proof of income, pay stubs, credit reports printed out and were ready to sign the lease right there. I was particularly nervous about the whole situation as I was unemployed when looking for an apartment and had no verifiable income that I could list. The only thing I had in my favor was a good credit score from the three credit bureaus. I was able to find this out easily with American Express CreditSecure credit report monitoring ($2 for the first month, then cancel immediately). The FTC lists authorized, free ways to acquire your credit report but I am not sure whether their recommended service can get the report the same day. Some apartment listings state they will waive the application fee if you come to the viewing with a recent credit report in hand.

I got a call back from the leasing agent saying that the landlord gave me two options: I could get a cosigner or since I had a good credit score they would let me sign the lease if I provided two months rent (2x security deposit) in addition to the first month’s prorated rent. I chose the latter option as it would be quicker and help my credit score in the long-run. That meant I had get a hefty cashier’s check made before I got the keys to the apartment.

In no particular order, here are some random apartment things I learned during my hunt and lease signing process:

You don’t need air conditioning in San Francisco. It’s mid-May and I have my heater on right now. Though I did purchase a small Vornado fan (”air circulator”) for the few summer days that it does reach 80 degrees in the city.

In-unit washer and dryer is just about impossible to find. Same with dishwasher. If you find an in-building washer and dryer, you’re sitting pretty.

Just about everything is early 1900s construction and has hardwood floors. In fact many listings love pointing out period details, stating Edwardian this or Victorian that.

Many apartments with hardwood floor state in the lease that tenants must cover 80% of the floor with carpet to alleviate noise issues for neighbors. To give you an idea, a 6′ by 10′ carpet from Ikea costs $199 and you would need two to make it look like 80% of the floor was covered. Keep that in mind. Of course there are definitely cheaper places to buy carpet.

You get two pamphlets when you sign your lease: how to deal with lead-based paint and how to survive natural disasters like fires and earthquakes.

While getting renter’s insurance you will be asked if you want to buy earthquake insurance (doubles the price). The local Best Buy sells “Quake Straps” to fasten your TV to the wall.

It’s important to ask the leasing agent if previous tenants have (successfully) had DSL/Cable installed prior. Buildings built in the early 1900’s don’t have the best wiring and that may affect signal quality and thus performance.

There is an ISP called Web-Pass that offers FTTH for certain properties. Check to see if those properties have any apartment listings because the service is great: 45 or 100 megabit. Otherwise Comcast offers up to 50 megabits down with their “Extreme 50″ plan — if the 250GB/month bandwidth cap does not bother you.

It takes Comcast at least a week to come for an installation appointment. If you’re lucky one of your friends will have a Sprint Overdrive or Verizon MiFi you can borrow.

Buying a bed? Most places deliver same day for free (but it’s implied you tip them). I got my queen, box spring and frame from a place called Sleep Train.

Obvious Pro Tip: Save up before heading out to San Francisco while unemployed. If you plan on living by yourself, I would say at least $5,000-7,500 would be a decent number to have in mind if you can live somewhat frugally. Otherwise, and especially if you are moving cross-country, $8,000+ would be best. Friends that have moved to San Francisco through work received ~$10k relocation bonuses, so that’s what their companies value the move at. Please leave a comment below if you have thoughts on this.

Moving

#roadtrip: gas ~$350, hotels ~$370

I spent some time deciding how I wanted to move. Should I rent a U-Haul truck and car trailer to drive out? Or should I rent the U-Haul and have my car shipped out? Or maybe I should have my stuff sent out in a shipping crate while I drive out or perhaps I just leave the car at home and fly out? Eventually I went back to one of my favorite Paul Graham essays, Stuff, and read it again. I took that to heart and sold or donated as much of my stuff as I could with ease.

Zooey, my beloved black labrador? I found her a loving new home where she will be much happier than in a small San Francisco studio apartment while I am out much of the day.

Zooey’s new owner is a long-distance runner and gives Zooey all the exercise she needs. Farewell pup.

Surprisingly, I sold almost everything through Twitter and Tumblr. This made sense financially as well — a shipping container would have cost $1,600 for port to port delivery which requires renting a truck to load and unload, or $2,400 for door to door delivery. Another alternative would have been shipping some boxes on a pallet. I believe that runs in the $400-$600 range.

A few small boxes, a suitcase and my laptop remained. And my AT&T 3G MicroCell because their network sucks everywhere I go and at the very least I want good signal at home. If you are in the same boat, I highly recommend you consider the MicroCell. Aside from a few dropped calls when my iPhone switches between the MicroCell and a regular cell tower, I am very happy with the MicroCell.

I can’t say thanks enough to everyone in Atlanta for coming out to Startup Drinks to say goodbye to me! Atlanta tech blog extraordinaire TechDrawl covered the event and chatted with me beforehand on why I decided to make the big move.

Atlanta-based rapper T.I. made an appearance of sorts at the gathering; his rap studio Grand Hustle Records happens to be next door.

T.I. posing with his Ferrari 599 ($320k+) after @marisasharpe asked him if I could take his picture. Note his new white Porsche Panamera in the background — he mentioned that car in the song “Winner” feat Jamie Foxx and Justin Timberlake. That’s his second Panamera; he also bought his lady friend a black Porsche Panamera Turbo ($130k+). </car_talk>

And some obligatory road trip pictures.

Getting close to the desert

The landscape started getting interesting in New Mexico. Everything else East made for a boring drive.

Pipe Creek Vista — Grand Canyon, South Rim in Arizona

This picture definitely does not do the Grand Canyon justice. I highly recommend visiting.

The beautiful Hoover Dam

Crossing the Bay Bridge

The City

The first thing I wanted to learn about San Francisco was getting around with public transportation. Coming from Atlanta, which is definitely a car city, I had lots of catching up to do. For those unfamiliar with transportation in the bay area, there are quite a few options: Caltrain, BART, Muni, AC transit, VTA light rail (south bay) in addition to taxis, ZipCar and City CarShare. If you take public transit with any regularity you will probably want to get a TransLink card (soon to be renamed Clipper). Otherwise keep some crisp dollar bills on hand at all times for Muni. There’s nothing worse than holding up a line of people trying to get on the bus while you try to cram in two crumpled dollars into the machine.

Left to Right: monthly Muni pass ($60. getting phased out by TransLink), BART pass (TransLink can also do this), TransLink card, ZipCard.

Other things I’ve learned:

Last Caltrain out of San Francisco leaves at midnight. Muni runs 24 hours. BART stops running at midnight and resumes 4am on weekdays, 6am on Saturdays and 8am on Sundays.

It’s always chilly. I have yet to get a chance to wear shorts. I went to Union Square and got some more jeans the first week. I will probably need to get another windbreaker. Gabor told me he quickly learned that everyone out here wears button-up shirts when going out, so he had to beef up his wardrobe in that regard.

It takes about 30 minutes to get to downtown from the Mission on Muni (only 2-3 miles). On BART or underground Muni rail it’s more like 10 minutes.

The most I’ve had to pay to get across town (well, almost across town: Mission to North Beach) via taxi was $15. Mission to downtown is about $8 (not including tip). (First 1/5th mile is $3.10 with every additional 1/5th mile or minute adding 45 cents.)

Yellow and Luxor cabs accept credit/debit cards.

Keep an eye out for some parts of Market Street that have taxi/bus-only left lanes.

Driving in San Francisco takes some getting used to because the traffic lights are usually on the sides, not hanging above the intersections.

Finding a cab in SoMa once a Giants game lets out is rather difficult.

iPhone Google Maps has excellent public transit information but can drastically tell you different routes just to get you on a bus/train sooner, even if the trip might be longer. Tinker with changing your departure time. Alternatively there are many iPhone apps for transportation info: Taxi Magic, MyCaltrain, iCommute SF, Pocket Muni, iBart Live. NextMuni.com is also useful.

Do not fall asleep on BART or you will miss the Embarcadero stop and end up in Oakland. I speak from experience and a series of entertaining tweets.

Two Ikeas: Emeryville just across the Bay Bridge and in East Palo Alto

There is a Pinkberry near Stanford campus. Fraiche Yogurt in Palo Alto is great too — Steve Jobs has been spotted there before. Watch the Scoble interview.

Tea tasting is the thing to do in Chinatown. Also, Ten Ren at 949 Grant Ave is a great place for $3 tapioca bubble tea.

People here were not joking around; AT&T is horrible in San Francisco. In particular I have noticed many dead spots around the Mission.

Ocean Beach in San Francisco near Cliff House and Sutro Baths

Driving down Lombard like a tourist.

In Short: For someone coming from Atlanta, SF Public transportation is great. I brought a car out here and now I’m already thinking about getting rid of it. Related: parallel parking on a steep hill with a manual transmission is annoying.

Thoughts

I have now been in San Francisco for exactly two weeks and I am in love with the city. Hopefully this honeymoon period does not fizzle away too soon.

Any questions? Have any of you made a cross-country or other such long-distance move before? Reading this and live in San Francisco? Let’s meetup some time.

Enjoy this post? Click through and leave a comment. It will make my day. Atlanta to San Francisco: What I Learned Moving Cross-Country

In preparation for my move to San Francisco I have started selling many of my electronics and sundry possessions. Unfortunately, this included my absolute favorite technology purchase in recent years — the KRK Rokit RP5G2 studio monitors I discussed at length in my How To: Upgrade to Studio Monitor Speakers post. After selling the Rokits I began considering headphones as a replacement for my audio consuming needs. Investing in high quality headphones started to make sense for a few reasons:

1) I will likely have roommates at some point during my life in San Francisco and I can’t blast music all day and night

2) My roommates might blast music all day and night so I will need some good noise canceling headphones to concentrate while I work

After I decided to look into high quality headphones I became reacquainted with the Beats. While I had been aware of them since their 2008 Consumer Electronics Show debut, I never gave them a real look solely due to the Monster Cable association. I assumed the overpriced Beats were junk, as is the case with most Monster products (my lawyer tells me it’s not libel if it’s true). The headphones are the product of a collaboration between revered rapper, actor and producer Dr. Dre and Monster Cable. Monster positioned the Beats Studio headphones as their flagship personal audio product with an MSRP of $349.95 USD.

Monster also has a cheaper offering called the Beats Solo; they are smaller and lightweight but lack noise canceling functionality. The Beats Solo (MSRP $199.95 USD) are — according to a Monster representative on their Facebook page — geared towards bass while the Beats Studio were designed for all-around flat response. I would have thought it was the other way around with the powered Beats Studio being meant for bass. I say this because the Beats Studio have excellent bass, which I will discuss in the performance section of this review. The only Monster headphones product priced above the Beats Studio is a DJ-oriented pair, called Beats Spin, slated for a June 2010 release.

Beats Studio circumaural (also known as full-size) headphones as modeled by yours truly.

Let me start this review off by making it clear that I am an extreme critic of all things Monster Cable and feel they only sell over-marketed and overpriced crap aimed at taking advantage of not-quite-tech-savvy consumers unaware of facts like how HDMI is a digital signal and there is no difference in signal and thus video quality between a $10 Monoprice cable and a $250 Monster cable.

Unboxing and Setup

The Beats Studio unboxed. They come with a touring case they fold nicely into.

The Beats Studio box was a little larger and heavier than I expected. The box sleeve slides off to uncover a nice unfolding box displaying the Beats already folded inside of their own cheap carrying case. Glancing at the other side of the box reveals cables, adapters, batteries and promotional material. There are two adapters provided — one for converting the 3.5mm mini-jack to a 1/4-inch TRS connector as well as a dual-prong airplane audio adapter. Two male-to-male mini-jack cables (a red and black one) are included; both 4.26 feet (1.3m) long. The Beats Studio headphones do not have any audio cables permanently attached and have a female mini-jack port built-in — a very handy feature for a number of reasons. I like that I am not tied down to using the provided cables. If I wanted a different length or style of cable, such as a coiled cable, or if I just need to replace a damaged cable, I do not have to replace the headphones too. That being said, I think the included cables are the perfect length. Some people have complained that they are too short but they are perfect for my typical use — using them with my MacBook Pro on my desk or lap as well as using them with my iPhone in my pocket.

One small nitpick – I would have liked a right angle connector for when using the Beats on a laptop. For example on a plane or when computing on your lap it is annoying to have cables sticking straight out.

The black cable, dubbed the iSoniTalk cable for its handy compatibility with iPhones, includes an inline microphone and button. When connected to my MacBook Pro the button on the iSoniTalk cable can pause/play iTunes music and when connected to my iPhone can do the same as well as accept incoming calls and end them. It’s regrettable that using the Beats Studio as a headset does not workout well; it’s hard to hear yourself talk and the microphone is placed a little too far back to get clear sound without holding it closer to your mouth.

Beats Studio Headphones with Monster iSoniTalk cable and iPhone

Those unfamiliar with the Beats Studio will be taken aback by the included batteries. Why do headphones need batteries? Well the Beats Studio use the batteries for both amplification purposes and to power the integrated noise canceling circuitry. More on how this all works later on. Installing the batteries was a trivial process that required unscrewing a panel on the left ear cup. The right ear cup houses the power switch and indicator LED.

A panel on the left ear cup unscrews to show the required 2 AAA batteries. When these die, I’ll replace them with lightweight lithiums.

Unfortunately — and this is a huge downside for the Beats Studio — the headphones only work with batteries installed and the noise canceling switch flipped on. There is no passive setting devoid of noise canceling that does not need battery power. You cannot use them at all without batteries.

The red LED means the Beats are on with noise canceling engaged. The LED turns orange when battery power is low.

The case is likely that the 40mm drivers used are too large to be powered without the aid of batteries. You will need to keep a drawer full of AAA batteries on hand. Okay I am exaggerating a bit, but an active user will need to replace batteries every 2 weeks with a moderate user replacing them every month. Of course, if you forget to turn off the headphones one night the batteries will need replacing much sooner. I have not owned the Beats long enough to test battery life claims but Jake Jarvis provided me with the aforementioned data from his own Beats Studio experience.

Fit, Finish and Feel

Everything about the Beats draws attention, for better or for worse. The outer facing construction is glossy plastic, which while looks nice at first I can imagine it will quickly become scratched and show regular wear and tear more so than if it had a matte finish. Monster claims the finish is scratch-resistant and I have only had the Beats for a week so I can’t comment on that yet. One thing is for sure though, the exterior is a fingerprint magnet. That explains the included microfiber cloth.

The inner plastic of the headband has a matte finish that I like considerably more. Moving up the inside of the headband there are two small aluminum pieces neatly engraved with “studio” on one side and the Monster logo on the other side. The entire headphones assembly weighs in at just under 0.6 pounds. Compared to professional studio reference headphones weighing in around 0.7 pounds that are classified as mid-weight, the Beats are on the lighter side. While I personally prefer heavier headphones, the lightweight Beats Studio are ideal for travel.

In the event the color black is not your style, Monster also sells white and Boston Red Sox themed versions (at a $50 premium). Alternatively, you may opt to send in your Beats to ColorWare and have them drop some candy paint all over your ‘phones however you like for $250.

It’s hard to find a side of these headphones that isn’t branded or marked in some way; something that might deter potential owners.

Okay so that’s a description of the headphones, but how do they really feel? Honestly, they seem flimsy and very plastic-y. While holding or putting them on there is a bit of a “plastic on plastic” dissonance. There are small fitment details that annoy me too. For example, the joints can extend slightly backwards past their stopping point. Another annoyance is that the ear cups freely move about and have no resistance, making for a plastic clank whenever you take off or move the headphones and the ear cups immediately drop.

Sign of a cheap paint job lacking uniformity – the clearcoat/paint beads up next to edges. It should be pristine for the price Monster is asking.

Everything thus far in this section has more or less been nitpicking. What about the comfort? I can’t knock off any points there; the Beats Studio feel great. Despite the ear cups and headband being wrapped in some sort of cheap vinyl/leatherette they never became too hot and remained dry.

Can you say glossy?

Performance

As with all quality audio devices, best testing practices include listening to uncompressed (WAV), lossless (FLAC) or high bit-rate audio (256+ kbps MP3). In addition, it would be wise to test these headphones with a quality standalone audio output device like the PreSonus AudioBox USB I used in my Rokit studio monitor setup. However, I opted to test without an external audio output device as most people reading this review wouldn’t use one; more importantly these headphones are meant to be mobile; used with iPhones and so on, but I digress. I listened to a plethora of FLAC and high bit-rate MP3 files with the equalizer off and OS volume at varying levels between 5% and 60% (Pro Tip: hold option and shift in OS X while adjusting volume to increase/decrease in tiny increments).

Before I dive into details, I will talk about the noise canceling feature of these headphones. Despite being called “isolation” headphones, the Beats are powered, active noise canceling headphones. This can be tested by simply turning them on and wearing them; no audio source or input cable necessary. My unscientific decibel meter (iPhone app) tests showed a max reduction of 4-5 dB. That is to say the average ambient noise level with the headphones worn but switched off was 44 dB and with them switched on it was 40 dB. I tried this in a number of scenarios with differing ambient noise levels. With the air conditioning on, the average ambient noise level was 53 dB and with the Beats Studio switched on it dropped to 48 dB. Monster claims a maximum actual noise reduction of up to -14 dB. However, it is important to note that the Beats Studio seem to do a better job at canceling out lower frequency sounds like air conditioning and refrigerator noise as well as some high frequency fluorescent lamp ballast hum than mid-range frequency sounds like people talking. Is a 4 or 5 dB reduction in noise level noticeable? Definitely. I would rate the noise canceling functionality in the Beats Studio as above average. Part of the secret behind this could be that Monster placed the microphones necessary for noise canceling on the inside of the ear cups, more accurate to what your ears hear, than on the outside of the ear cups. I have yet to take these on a flight with me but I imagine they will be a welcomed traveling companion.

Do they sound any good? While Monster claims these headphones are more about all-around flat response than being bass biased, my first impressions were along the lines of ”Whoa, these things can make some great bass.” For the most part bass is punchy with a response that is much closer to tight than boomy. Most rap songs tend to have a continuous boomy bass line — for example “Coca Coca” on Gucci Mane’s The Burrrprint 2 HD album — and while the Beats perform well with those types of songs, the bass tends to overpower the weak midtones. Examples of punchy bass are found in any track on the new Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach. That is the type of music that shows where the Beats excel, without any overpowering bass. Treble with the Beats Studio is clear and succinct. Any of DJ Tiësto’s albums bring this out — in particular listen to “Sweet Mysery” on the Just Be album. It is the midtone reproduction with the Beats that I take issue with; it is a bit muffled. Bumping up the 250 – 2k range a tad makes midtones sound much more reasonable.

One particular measurement metric for audio quality is instrument separation, whether you can hear individual instruments in the music as if they are on their own rather than mixed and coming out as just one sound. This is an area where studio reference headphones and monitors must perform well so producers and studio boffins can accurately know what each change in their mixing sounds like. Unfortunately, this was a bit of a hit or miss with the Beats. At times I was able to detect a slight sense of instrument separation but most of the time, and this was throughout many of the tracks I listened to, it all just sounded mashed together. An example of a song where I was able to hear this favored instrument separation was in the song “Reckoner’s Encore” on the Jaydiohead: Encore mix album.

Overall, the Beats perform well and I was most impressed with their ability to create bass like I’ve never heard on headphones before. I enjoy it so much I often adjust my equalizer settings to emphasize bass, such as when I’m watching Live Free or Die Hard and want to feel the movie, so to speak. If you don’t consider yourself an audiophile (I don’t) I think you will be happy with the Beats.

Sound Leak

Below is a quick video of me showing off one particular issue with the Beats Studio; sound leak. Of course this happens with most headphones but it feels much more apparent with these headphones. Even at a comfortable 25% volume, I think they might be too loud in a library setting. I think it will be pretty easy to tell what song I’m listening to in this video.

Beware Wi-Fi

While reviewing the Beats Studio I did notice one interesting quirk. I was watching an HD movie on my laptop streamed over Wi-Fi from my NAS across the room. I was wearing the Beats and noticed that in certain positions, notably when I pointed my head in the direction of the router, a prevalent static entered the headphones. I paused the movie stream and the static went away. I pressed play and the static came back.

I was about 10 feet away from my router — a typical distance for any apartment dweller. Given this experience I can only surmise that the Beats Studio are susceptible to radio interference and could use some shielding.

Verdict

This is the part of the review where I mention how these headphones are expensive and then try to decide if their features, quality and performance can justify the cost. I purchased my Beats Studios for $229 USD from some random e-tailer I found on Froogle. Most retailers like Amazon charge around $299 while Monster sells them for a whopping $350. If I had no idea how much the Beats Studio cost and someone asked me to price them, I would say $199 would be a good price; nowhere near $300. The headphones feel like a toy with flimsy construction and cheap materials. Looking around online I have found several reports of ear cushions separating from the ear cups, among other build quality issues.

Another sizable downside to the Beats is their battery requirement. The option to have a non-amplified, passive setting lacking noise-canceling — even at the expense of degraded audio quality — would be a huge boon. I would hate to be traveling and risk carrying around useless headphones for the rest of my trip unless I kept extra AAA batteries handy.

The Beats do have one thing going for them over their more expensive professional counterparts; they are mobile. They are lightweight and fold compact with ease. In addition, you don’t have to deal with some ridiculous 10 foot cord. The included 1.3 meter mini-jack cable is the perfect length for tasks like plugging into your laptop on a flight. The mute button on the Beats is ideal for one particular scenario that keeps coming to mind — ordering your drink or snack on a flight. I always have to take out one ear bud and pause my music or movie.

That brings me to one point about flying with headphones or ear buds. From moving about in my seat or leaning over to grab something I always manage knock out my ear buds, which is fine as I would rather that happen than break the headphones port in my laptop. With the Beats though, they are firmly planted on my head and the same action would stress the mini-jacks. That’s not a big deal for the cable in the headphones, it would just unplug itself. However, depending on where the force is coming from, it could damage the laptop jack. It would be safer if one end of the cable employed a right-angle connector or magsafe-inspired technology from Replug.

I give the Beats by Dr. Dre Studio headphones by Monster 6 out of 10 Stammy’s. If they were $199 I would rate them closer to an 8.

Disclaimer: I am not an audiophile.

What do you think of the Beats Studio? What headphones or ear buds do you use? Any of them with noise canceling?